Greetings from the New World! As I have wrapped up my tenure with Microsoft patterns & practices, this is now my new blog. Thanks for stopping by. Here I’ll post my thoughts, analyses, reviews and reflections on various aspects of computer science and software engineering – both from industrial and research perspectives. One of the things I’d like to do is to re-examine some of the established practices in new contexts (especially in light of the recent debates such as this one).

But first, let me describe what lies ahead for me professionally.

I’m now a part of the state of Splunk. Yes, it’s official.

In a nutshell, Splunk is the leading provider of a software analytics platform for furthering real-time operational and business intelligence. While I’m feeling the thrill of this “new world” and its varied people and projects, it is not much of a radical shift back to academia or to another industry. I am simply repositioning myself.

So, what are some of my reasons for choosing Splunk?

Culture – it’s innovative, disruptive and fun. The company strives to lead, not follow. Also, everybody, I repeat, everybody I’ve met is committed and passionate about their work and people are really comfortable criticizing each other. This enthusiasm and passion are contagious. Importantly, what I really like is that both the management and the employees are putting deliberate joint effort into engineering the culture. They are cognizant about it and they focus on maintaining it as a precious commodity. All in all, company’s core values resonate with mine.

Mission – I’m a believer in the mission of Splunk to make sense out of the massive amounts of machine data (often obscured and/or buried deep inside multitude of sources and systems). Through pattern mining and clever analyses, Splunk helps pinpoint answers, gain both operational and business insights, and ultimately solve real-world problems.

Opportunity to challenge myself – I’m getting out of my comfort zone, stepping into an unfamiliar platform, new dev environments, new team, tools, methods, techniques. While some may consider this frightening, I actually welcome this change. I think this will entice broader learning and fuel my personal growth.

The company is still young and there’s an opportunity to help it grow and mature. In particular, my focus will be on taking it beyond the IT departments and growing the developer ecosystem.

Polyglot programming – the platform targets and should appeal to all kind of developers (Java, Python, .NET, Ruby, Node.js). This allows me to gain command of many languages, to explore multiple paradigms and a host of new, surprising dimensions that are easy to miss when focusing on one particular language/development platform for too long. This also allows branching out into multiple dev communities. I very much look forward to meeting many new people and learning from your experiences!

New, exciting domains – the company has been determinately expanding and advancing into new domains, such as security and the IoT. Personally, I’m very interested in the application of modern machine learning advancements to predictive analytics, maintenance and security.

Real team room environment – it is often that you don’t recognize the value of something as acutely till you actually lose it. This is what happened to my previous team. Unfortunately, our fantastic space (designed by the team itself) was taken away and we ended up in the premises not really conducive of team communication and osmosis. Ever since then I have had this intense longing for working in a real team room again.

Upward potential – People who work here appear confident in the future of the company. I too sense a great upward potential for the stock, which, of course, comes with greater risk and volatility. Still I’m betting on the success of the company. Time will tell.

Working closely again with my former colleagues (esteemed @markgrovs and illustrious @gblock) is an added bonus.

I’m ready to embark onto this new and exciting journey. Stay tuned for the updates – both on this blog and through @gmelnik. And don’t forget to checkout our http://dev.splunk.com site.